New sensors potentially showing up in future Android phones could facilitate things like better augmented reality, and capturing 3D measurements of indoor spaces. -Tom
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9246499/Google_phone_project_could_transform_smartphones?taxonomyId=75 Google phone project could transform smartphones Part of what Google is calling Project Tango, the phone has special sensors and chips that enable it to map indoor spaces. The initiative is comparable to Google's Glass Explorer program... the aim is to leverage the creativity of some developers to define what might be possible with the Tango system. ...Project Tango phones have built-in gyroscopes and compasses, so the phone knows which direction it's pointing in and how its orientation is changed when you move it around. In addition, Tango phones have sensors that have been compared to those in Microsoft's Kinect gaming product. In fact, the project is headed by a former Kinect team leader. On the back, the phone has a four-megapixel camera, a depth sensor and a dedicated motion-tracking camera. The sensors can tell where the floor and ceiling are, where the walls and doors are, and where objects are located inside a room. This information is combined with the phone's orientation sensor data to enable the phone to not only create a 3D map of an indoor space, but also pinpoint its location within that space. One of the astonishing feats of Tango, according to Google, is that it can take "a quarter million 3D measurements every single second," according to a video posted on the Google Tango site. The phone uses something called the Myriad 1 vision processor platform from Silicon Valley-based Movidius. The chip is a kind of co-processor for processing vision data that used to cost a fortune and consume massive battery power -- far too powerful for a mobile device. But a new generation makes it possible to build the Myriad 1 into a phone. ... Project Tango http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qe10ExwzCqk _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
